Taxes, bankruptcy costs, transactions costs, adverse selection, and agency conflicts have all
been advocated as major explanations for the corporate use of debt financing. These ideas …

Game theory, the formalized study of strategy, began in the 1940s by asking how
emotionless geniuses should play games, but ignored until recently how average people …

This paper examines the relative importance of many factors in the capital structure
decisions of publicly traded American firms from 1950 to 2003. The most reliable factors for …

We test the pecking order theory of corporate leverage on a broad cross-section of publicly
traded American firms for 1971 to 1998. Contrary to the pecking order theory, net equity …

A small but increasing number of economists have begun to use laboratory experiments to
evaluate economic propositions under carefully controlled conditions. Experimental …

This review evaluates the four major theories of corporate financing:(1) the Modigliani–Miller
theory of capital-structure irrelevance, in which firm values and real investment decisions are …

This paper examines experimentally the effects of allowing individuals to contribute any
desired proportion of their endowments toward a threshold public good. Permitting …

We show how trade credit use depends on the value of collateral in a repossession, as well
as the extent to which firms face adverse selection problems when dealing with an outside …

We examine contributions to a public good when some donors do not know the true value of
the good. If donors in such an environment determine the sequence of moves, two …

This paper examines the relative importance of 39 factors in the leverage decisions of
publicly traded US firms. The pecking order and market timing theories do not provide good …